[Board] Sponsorship funding and value for money

[Jo Walsh]

dear Tyler, all,

This is an issue on which the whole Board has a responsibility and
role. I wanted to focus all our attention, not just Tyler's. 
So I don't want to get into a point-for-point, but try to offer a 
general analysis of some of the responses I have seen. After this I
will back off, I am probably already getting too critical.

> primarily doing marketing, promotion, education outreach, community  
> assistance, sponsor dialogue, promotion and extension through the  
> journal, presentations to would-be users/sponsors, etc.  
 
This list is just too long. Having this many foci will make it hard
to achieve anything that isn't in the "trains running on time" class.
Now, if Tyler is going to focus more time on things that aren't being 
done now - generating press coverage and thus wider interest by writing 
articles that will travel in either non-geo or non-open-source contexts -
or spending more time actively engaging with other potential sponsors 
than ADSK - there's a need to stop doing some of the things on this
list, and to revisit the job description to reflect that.

In de-prioritising some of those things, it makes sense to defocus on 
those tasks which can or are being carried out by "volunteer" labour
(Such as website development and maintenance, editorial work on the
journal) or by separate budgets (work on the marketing plan and materials).
In going through this process, we collectively cannot avoid the
question of whether the remaining activities provide an optimum fit,
cost/benefit wise, with the Foundation's overall goals. 

(Tyler, I am not pressuring you to defend your role or your
responsibilities. Each of us has our own biases and priorities that 
infect our work in general in Open Source Geospatial. OSGeo has a Board
in order that individual biases towards different kinds and styles of 
action, balance out. I think we have not offered, collectively and 
publically, enough feedback on and oversight of your day-to-day work.
But volunteer oversight of well-paid single-person staff has been harder 
than it looked at first, it needs more information being shared both ways)

I would like to offer the following feedback on your priorities.
The Journal is the one item on the task laundry list that I am least
convinced about in terms of current cost/benefit. Is there a standard
access stats package running - through drupal or a standalone thing or
even Google analytics? - through which we can get a sense of how often 
and how widely the Journal is being downloaded? How much of the content 
is being re-used in other channels, to double as "promotional"? 
Are you getting interest from more volunteers to replace those who
are already burning out? Has there been much spread of the Journal
except through already "friendly" channels? (a quick Yahoo! search
suggests that this is not the case) Are referrals and traffic increasing?
If there aren't answers to these kinds of questions already, 
I would like to call a moratorium on Journal development after Vol.3
until there are.
  
Support and mentorship for local chapters seems like the main thing
that would be difficult to cover effectively and reliably through
volunteerism, it's nice to see the focus increasing there and to
understand that this is a good vector for future financial support.
But there is a lot that can be done remotely, visits are a luxury.

There are so many people who can speak convincingly for the OSGeo
organisation and whose attendance would mean a lot in terms of honour
and credibility for a local chapter - to have Frank or Markus turn
up and offer a keynote! Or why not consider offering the travel
support coming from the community to software project members/mentors who 
contribute so much time to the core reason why OSGeo exists, afterall,
a gesture of spreading goodwill within the community, and reassuring
the project participants that membership in OSGeo is for the best. 

Marketing has a separate budget and paid people working on that now.
I really like the looks of what is taking shape on the wiki there, as 
the fact this is a specifically budgeted effort encourages community
members to rally round and contribute. If Tyler is managing the 
marketing company people, can that be done in public where others can 
offer commentary?

~~~~

On the direct question of sponsorship fundraising; +1 on all of
Frank's commentary. While the 501(c)3 is core to OSGeo's legal
existence right now, OSGeo is an international foundation, the US 
constituency for sponsorship may be a vocal one but its concerns do 
not need to be prioritised so as to impede support from other regions. 

This vocabulary of "soliciting", "sales pitches" and so on,
it gives me the willies. Surely sponsorship is oriented around 
social networks, good contacts, and to some extent serendipity.
Companies will either have a long history of support for free and open
source geospatial or be undergoing a sudden powerful conversion 
for their own business ends and not need externally convinced of the
merits of OSGeo software and culture by the kind of marketing
materials that we have under development. 

The support of the ED would be invaluable for working out details while
sponsorship is being agreed, for followup communications to keep
sponsors informed and see if they are satisfied, for work on reports 
that show sponsors and members what they are getting, copywriting,
but I hadn't envisaged "soliciting" or "sales" as being core. 

> > As for fundraising specifically, I can assure you this is a very real  
> > situation for me to appreciate, having had lots of discussions with  
> > Autodesk over the past year about the future of funding, strategy, etc

It's likely enough I missed an email. Can you point me to an archive
where the substance of these funding and strategy discussions with
Autodesk was relayed to the Board, or to the Fundraising committee?

cheers,


jo